Can Digital Marketing Replace Traditional Marketing? - An Article authored by Digital Vidya's CEO Pradeep Chopra, published in Sep Issue of CFO Connect Magazine. If you are interested in exploiting the opportunity of Digital Marketing for personal and organizational growth, you will find this article useful.

1. on the Job
Can Digital Marketing Replace
Traditional Marketing?
Pradeep Chopra says it is important to embrace digital marketing
as a part of overall marketing strategy
success. Unlike software develop-ment,
where requirements can be
captured to the finest details and
there’s very high degree of certainty,
digital marketing if outsourced to an
agency must be treated differently.
Active involvement of key stake-holders,
especially that of the mar-keting
team is critical for the suc-cess
of digital marketing even
if it is outsourced to an external
agency. The relationship between
the company and the agency has
to be more of partner relation vs
a typical client-vendor relation. In
addition to providing understand-ing
of the customer’s concerns and
their behaviour to the agency, the
company play active role in strategy
development, content creation and
regular reviews.
3. Content is not a big deal: In case of
digital marketing, content speaks
on behalf of the company. A large
number of digital marketing ini-tiatives
fail because organisations
underestimate the requirement of
the content. When outsourced, they
expect the agency to take care of it
fully.
In addition to the volume and
quality of the content required,
managing various types of content
based on platforms used is mostly
underestimated. This failure in
planning for the content is one of the
major reasons of failure of digital
marketing campaigns whether done
in house or outsourced. It also leads
to crisis situations especially in case
of real time customer engagement
campaigns on social media.
4. Everything is measurable in digital
media: Measurability is one of the
biggest advantages of digital media.
However, over the years, it’s over-
According to eMarketer, digi-tal
advertising spend will
increase to over USD 137 bil-lion
globally in 2014. This is a
phenomenal growth of more
than 14 per cent over 2013 spend. In-terestingly,
this will account for more
than 25 per cent of global media ad
spend. By 2018, digital advertising
spend is expected to be around one
third of global spend on advertising.
Considering this growth, market-ers
are significantly worried about the
future of traditional marketing. Many
have started to believe that digital
will replace traditional. On the other
hand, a large number of professionals
including business owners are still
thinking if they should invest in digital
or not. Like in any other industry, this
combination of over optimism and
fear about digital marketing is natural
and part of the evolution.
It is evident from the figures shared
that digital will not replace traditional
marketing but is complimentary to it.
For those who are really serious
about exploiting the opportunity of
digital media for personal or organ-isational
growth, it’s important that
these common myths about digital
marketing don’t sway them:
1. Digital Marketing is all about
technology: Unfortunately, a large
number of business owners includ-ing
marketing directors consider
digital marketing technical and
expect their IT teams to manage it.
This treatment is one of the biggest
reasons of failure of digital mar-keting
initiatives. Since they are
unaware of the potential of this new
medium, they don’t consider that
digital has to be an integral part of
their business strategy.
While technologies play a role in
While
technologies play
a role in expanding
the opportunity of
digital marketing,
digital marketing
has to be owned by
Director of Marketing
or CMO with
active involvement
from other key
stakeholders
including CEO, COO
and CFO.
expanding the opportunity of digital
marketing, digital marketing has to
be owned by Director of Marketing
or CMO with active involvement
from other key stakeholders includ-ing
CEO, COO and CFO. In case
of digital marketing campaigns,
content in various forms including
videos, pictures and presentations
speak to customers on behalf of
the organisation. While technology
can be and should be leveraged to
improve the effectiveness of content
and expand its reach, the role of
marketing team cannot be mini-mised.
2. Digital Marketing can be complete-ly
outsourced to an agency: For
the similar reasons shared above,
a large number of organisations
outsource their digital marketing
to external agencies and expect
them to be solely responsible for the
38 CFOCONNECT  September 2014

2. on the Job
sold both by individual practitioners
and digital marketing agencies.
Unfortunately, expectations around
measurability have become so un-real
today that a large number of
organisations are unwilling to invest
in digital marketing unless they are
given the guarantee of success. It
does not only kill the opportunity of
getting a new customer for a digital
marketing agency, it actually ends
up depleting the opportunity for the
company as it ends up not investing
into digital in absence of guaranteed
success including by their internal
team.
While measurability will continue
to be one of the key advantages of
digital media, marketers cannot ig-nore
the qualitative side of it and the
fact that success in digital requires
experimentation especially in the
current evolutionary stage of the
industry.
5. I don’t need to learn Digital Mar-keting
if I am outsourcing: One
of the questions we constantly
encounter when we speak to a busi-ness
owner or to a senior marketer
about the relevance of our digital
marketing training programs for
them is ‘Why do I need to learn this
medium when I can outsource it or
build an in-house team to take care
of it?”
There’s a
significant amount
of resistance when it
comes to embracing
new-age media for
traditional marketers.
This mindset comes
in their way of
acquiring relevant
skills for them to
deliver success…
There’s a significant amount of
resistance when it comes to embrac-ing
new-age media for traditional
marketers. This mindset comes
in their way of acquiring relevant
skills for them to deliver success of
their digital marketing campaigns
whether they are doing in-house or
outsourced to an agency. What kind
of people they should hire, what
should they expect from their inter-nal
teams and their agencies, what’s
the role their internal team and they
themselves need to play are some of
the key questions they need to have
answers for if they are really serious
about managing successful digital
marketing campaigns.
6. We should leverage social media
because everyone else is talk-ing
about it: While one should be
abreast of the latest happenings
within digital space and should
be willing to experiment with new
avenues, decision to leverage a
platform within digital should not
be solely based on its popularity.
It should actually be based on the
business objective and target audi-ence.
For eg. if a B2B organisation
wants to generate leads digitally, it
should definitely consider LinkedIn.
Having conducted many corporate
trainings, we regularly hear from
CMOs and brand managers about
their mistake in choosing an ap-propriate
digital media platforms
for their organisation.
The future obviously belongs to
integrated marketers especially in
large organisations. Doing digital
marketing or not is no more a ques-tion.
Instead of seeing digital as a
threat, embracing it as a part of overall
marketing strategy is the
only way to be success-ful
in the digital world. n
Pradeep Chopra is
CEO, Digital Vidya
September 2014  CFOCONNECT 39